SONG TITLE: A KISS AT THE END OF THE RAINBOW
PERFORMER: MITCH AND MICKEY (EUGENE LEVY AND CATHERINE O'HARA)
SONGWRITER: MICHAEL MCKEAN AND ANETTE O'TOOLE
YEAR OF RELEASE: 2003
COMMENTS: By rights, the principle credit must go to the songwriters. Michael McKean went from being Lenny to Spinal Tap (for which he helped write some actually pretty good songs) to this just exquisitely sad, beautiful song for A Mighty Wind. This is apparently one of the first couple of songs ever authored by his wife and co-writer. Apparently she'd been hiding her light under a bushel.
The song was written as the climax of the movie, the big moment of a tribute concert. Thus it comes it with a lot of backstory and great added meaning beyond the surface of the song.
The song itself is beautiful. It is a tender pop-folk melody, a romantic duet. Most obviously, this would parallel Sonny and Cher with "I Got You Babe." However, "A Kiss at the End of the Rainbow" is 100 times better and more powerful than the minor classic from Sonny and Cher.
For starters, this tune has more emotion, and more sophistication. "I Got You Babe" is catchy enough, but it's kind of a sing-song paint-by-numbers melody, a couple of decent very short melodic parts with no particular emotional emphasis or meaning. "A Kiss at the End of the Rainbow" is actually considerably catchier and more memorable, in significant part because it is simply more developed. Thus there's more melodic meat to catch on to.
Particularly, the lyric here is exponentially better than the Sonny and Cher model. Again, the words of "I Got You Babe" aren't bad. This simple declaration of faith in love is decently well executed. It's a decent explication of a basic pop song catechism.
"A Kiss at the End of the Rainbow," however, benefits greatly from the theatrical nature of the songwriting. That is, it is written in a self-conscious third person character as Gershwin or Berlin did, rather than being simply a page ripped out of Jewel's personal diary. It opens a far greater realm of possibilities than Alanis Morissette singing about her period, or whatever it is that she does.
This declaration of unending love comes expressed in these thick teenage romantic metaphors about knights and maidens fighting through veils of dreams to be together. Coming in a movie from the creators of Spinal Tap, you might expect humor, satire. There's some of that in the movie, and some of the other brilliant songs, but not here. It's dead straight. Basically, by this point the creators have too much invested in these characters and their particular personal tragedy to blow off their big climax as a cheap joke.
Article comments
1 - Gihan
Great article, I love the song too! Just a minor nitpick --- the word you're looking for is 'principal', not 'principle' which means altogether different.